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2/15/2007 12:03:00 AM

A Vision for the Second Century: Living the Vision

Editor's note: This article is the third in a series that highlights faculty, staff and students who embody the spirit of Rice's Vision for the Second Century.

BY LYNETTE MCGLAMERY
Special to the Rice News

Vision point: We must strengthen our graduate and postdoctoral programs to attract and recruit high-caliber students and young researchers.

“Amanda Knecht, professor of mathematics.” That’s what Knecht has dreamed of seeing on her office door since her freshman year at Texas Christian University, where her mathematics professors blew her away with their wit, knowledge and enthusiasm for the discipline.

“I wanted to be just like them,” she said.

JEFF FITLOW

Graduate student Amanda Knecht is a success story in the Department of Mathematics, not only proving herself academically but also developing an impressive talent for educating and mentoring undergraduates.

And during her five years as a mathematics graduate student at Rice, Knecht, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in May, has had plenty of opportunities to hone her own teaching style — opportunities that, in the past, were hard to find on the Rice campus.

This mind-set is changing with Rice’s vision for graduate education, which encourages departments to find ways to give graduate students the teaching experiences that will help them secure tenure-track positions with other universities while preserving the quality of Rice’s undergraduate classes and honoring its time-honored tradition of having the majority of classes taught by faculty.

The Department of Mathematics already has a successful model in place. Graduate students in the department are required to take six semesters of a teaching seminar before they can step into a classroom. In the seminar, they practice lecturing, discuss teaching techniques and learn how to create exams, among other things. During this time, they also serve as teaching assistants, grading exams and holding weekly help sessions.

They are then assigned a class of no more than 25 students that is held at the same time as another section taught by someone with a Ph.D. This gives undergraduates the choice of taking the class from a faculty member, and it gives graduate students a more seasoned teacher to compare notes with.

Knecht, who has taught a junior-level linear algebra class for math majors and a calculus II class for freshmen, said the department’s program helped set her up for success.

According to Michael Wolf, chair of the department, the classes taught by graduate students are very popular. Knecht said this might be due to undergraduates not feeling as intimidated by graduate students because they are closer in age and can relate to what undergraduates are going through.

“For many of my calculus students, my class was their first at Rice,” she said. “They took advantage of office hours because they felt comfortable asking me questions. I could empathize with what they were going through as freshmen because I felt many of the same things when I was in their shoes.”

To ensure she was doing a good job, Knecht invited faculty members to observe her in the classroom. She also had long-time Rice professor Tim Cochran observe her teaching and write a recommendation letter she could submit with job applications.

“I take my teaching assignments seriously and really care about student evaluations because they show whether I was effective in helping them to understand math concepts and whether my enthusiasm for math has rubbed off on them,” said Knecht, who has received some of the highest scores in the department.

Knecht said she also gained teaching and mentoring experience through Rice’s Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) program. In its fourth year of a five-year National Science Foundation grant, VIGRE brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students from the departments of mathematics, statistics and computational and applied mathematics to conduct research in 13 interrelated areas.

Knecht was a key member of the computational algebraic geometry group, led by her adviser, Brendan Hassett, professor of mathematics. For two semesters, she designed and led a weekly seminar for juniors and seniors who had no previous background on the topic. The seminar culminated with students completing individual projects that prepared them for summer research.

“Her approach was so successful that subsequent VIGRE graduate students used it as the model for the seminars they taught,” Hassett said.

In addition to her teaching skills, Hassett said Knecht is an equally gifted researcher. “Amanda’s research addresses some long-standing interpolation problems in algebra,” he said. “Her techniques are a significant advance on the mathematical methods currently used in computer graphics and geometric modeling.”

Knecht said her research has been well-supported with a graduate fellowship, a VIGRE fellowship and travel funds that allowed her to attend summer schools and workshops that exposed her research to other mathematicians.

“The department has a reputation in the math world for generously supporting its graduate students, and this, along with Dr. Hassett’s stellar reputation, is what drew me to Rice,” she said. “There’s an energy of learning here, with friendly faculty and a lot of young people around.”

Last fall, Knecht experienced one of the most thrilling moments in her young career — being invited to present colloquia to faculty and students at Tulane and Northern Illinois and in front of the very TCU professors who inspired her to become a mathematics professor.

“For the first time, I felt that I was now one of their colleagues,” she said.

And well on her way to becoming Professor Amanda Knecht.